Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?!


Question:

Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?


Answers:
The tomato is a fruit - actually a berry if you can believe it.
Science (botany) shows it's the ovary of a flowering plant, thus a fruit.
'Vegetable' is just a culinary term instead of a scientific one.
People label it a vegetable because of how it's used - as a sweet ingredient not used in desserts. Fruits are mostly associated with sweet desserts or stand alone, so the tomato has been misclassified generally because of the friends it keeps.
There's also an interesting history of how laws and taxing has tried to classify it in the past, debating use vs. science.
Check it out more at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tomato...

Source(s):
widipedia

A fruit.

A tomato is a fruit.

it's a veg.

Tomato is a fruit which is very commonly used as a vegetable as well.

it's a veggie - Do you ever find it in a fruit salad?

tomato is actually a fruit but usually we use it as item in dshes as a vegetable

its a vegetable, it grows really close to the ground.

Botanically speaking...it is a fruit.

An easy way to answer this question is...does it contain seeds? If the answer is yes, it's a fruit or nut.

The confusion about 'fruit' and 'vegetable' arises because of the differences in usage between scientists and cooks. Scientifically speaking, a tomato is definitely a fruit. True fruits are developed from the ovary in the base of the flower, and contain the seeds of the plant (though cultivated forms may be seedless). Blueberries, raspberries, and oranges are true fruits, and so are many kinds of nut. Some plants have a soft part which supports the seeds and is also called a 'fruit', though it is not developed from the ovary: the strawberry is an example. As far as cooking is concerned, some things which are strictly fruits may be called 'vegetables' because they are used in savoury rather than sweet cooking. The tomato, though technically a fruit, is often used as a vegetable, and a bean pod is also technically a fruit. The term 'vegetable' is more generally used of other edible parts of plants, such as cabbage leaves, celery stalks, and potato tubers, which are not strictly the fruit of the plant from which they come. Occasionally the term 'fruit' may be used to refer to a part of a plant which is not a fruit, but which is used in sweet cooking: rhubarb, for example. So a tomato is the fruit of the tomato plant, but can be used as a vegetable in cooking.

A vegetable. <*-*>

Tomato is a round vegetable with bright-red, occasionally yellow, skin and pulpy seedy flesh. It grows like fruit on climbing plants and is widely eaten cooked or raw.

Fruit

Some years back, I remember reading an article that stated a tomato was both. It's considered a fruit when it's raw and a vegetable when it's cooked. I don't know if the person who wrote that was being medicated or what, but I can't help but find this an intriguing concept.




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